This week’s video comes courtesy of Vortex Bladeless, a Spanish start-up that has proposed a new way of harnessing energy from wind.
Wind turbines currently use the rotation of blades to generate electricity from a turbine located in the top of the device.
As the company name suggests, the new solution from Spain dispenses with blades entirely.
Instead, the new system generates electricity by utilising the swaying of masts, which move magnets placed in a joint near the masts base.
The company has two models in development, the Vortex Gran (+1MW) for utilities and the 4kW Vortex Mini for domestic or industrial generation.
June 1, 2015 sees the launch of a crowdfunding campaign, the details of which can be found on the company’s website .
I doubt that this device will make enough energy to justify its manufacture.
It just doesn’t intercept enough area of wind or create large enough movements for a cost-efficient generator
The previous comment is an obvious issue, but I would assume that you would have many of these poles together in an array to extract the energy from the wind (steerable though?). Personally I have often thought that there are many other elegant ways to extract the energy from the wind beyond the currently in vogue methods.
I am not sure that deliberately designing something to vibrate is a good idea because it will lead to cycle fatigue problems in everything that is mechanically connected including the mounting to the ground.
Finally I would look carefully at what the ‘advantages’ of this idea are over conventional approaches, because they may not materialise when all other factors are considered.
Did you not hear all the dialogue? They clearly have designs on 4 kW light industrial, or home generator, and also 1MW+ design.
It all depends on the coupling between the wind, and the natural frequency of the device. The gain that can be achieved is tremendous, and with a possibly >50% capital cost savings, it is a winner design, very clever.
Sounds like something for nothing syndrome. Anyone remember cold fusion?
This is nothing more than an academic curiosity. Look at their website and then make your mind up.
As has already been said, this is much less efficient than a bladed generator and the vibration will snap it off at the bottom due to fatigue. They say it is silent – the vibration is directly coupled to the ground – would you want to live near that?
sorry to be negative but this won’t go anywhere except into the archives of failed Crowdfunding Projects.
What a load of nonsense. This has nothing to do with reality and they clearly don’t understand how a real wind turbine works by efficiently extracting energy way above the ground where the wind blows the strongest.
There are so many of these “new turbine” scams it’s not funny.
Quote…..”Wind turbines currently use the rotation of blades to generate electricity from a turbine located in the top of the device”.
1) – They are not Turbines, they are propeller blades attached to a vertical column, and for some hundreds of years called ‘windmills’ or in modern PC parlance ‘Wind Powered Electricity generators’.
2) – They do not generate electricity from a “turbine” mounted atop the device. It uses an electric generator powered via a gearbox which is driven by the propeller bladed windmill.
Come on Eds… are you all ex-Gurniad folk?
As for this Spanish device, I feel the vibrations and harmonics generated by a bank of them would be highly disruptive.
All wind powered electricity generation has, for me, very suspect ROI and efficiency figures, but if it is mandated for whatever reason that we should make some people very rich by building these, then a vertically bladed device would be better in high wind speeds and bring the Gearbox and generator down to where they belong – Ground level!.
Fantastic idea, go ahead and build them. Only then we’ll see if the technology works or not. I vote for the “Can do/Si, se puede” attitude on this.
If only there would have been so many “bring it down” comments when all the time wasting and dumb inducing apps, smart (?!) watches, virtual reality eyeglasses, violin playing or crepes flipping robots and gazillion other useless or not essential stuff are not only created, but funded in the billions.
We need the best and cleanest energy technology urgently, yesterday would have been ideal, so this Spanish company will get my cheerleading and my investment.
It would be also an emotional homage to the engineer who built the Tacoma Bridge and stood on it in great pain while the wind was destroying it under his feet. Isn’t this the way engineering history is made, from failure and sacrifice to triumph, from abandoned technologies as not technically or commercially feasible to great success at the right time with the right mindset.
Two points;
It’s not a turbine ! (Turbine = A machine in which a fluid (gas, steam, water or wind) passing over blades, is used to produce rotational movement.) – It maybe an energy extraction device …but it’s not a turbine !!
Crowdfunding – What a brilliant way to get idiot people to fund your lifestyle.
All you naysayer self appointed experts really think you know everything. It s not a conventional turbine and so what if it does not output as much? It won’t kill birds, make lots of noise and flcker. Materials are available that can last many thousands of vibrations without snapping off. Maybe that part can be swapped out periodically- who knows- certainly not you arm chair know it all people. Nothing is perfect in the first version, at least they are working at it. Ground noise? How far would you think that will travel?
Maybe this would work, it certainly stands a chance if its made strong enough. And maybe if they used a Solar array arround its column, then it could also generate when the wind isnt blowing 🙂
Sadly there are very few Power Engineers alive who understand the concept of a secure and integrated power.
They have had to watched their gold standard of 1984, fall into the hands of devout commercialism.
That gold standard, (created by public investment, technical and commercial competence), was bought by private enterprise, who’s behaviour has been as careless and profligate as any beneficiary of other peoples wealth.
The captains of these global enterprises, (the dummies of integrated power generation & transmission) have squandered that investment to near failure, and now comes the time for re-investment, their best offering is a ragbag of untried and untested micro generation solutions.
Despite their commercial success stories of the last 30 years, they have not built up the vast financial resources (the public invested between 1948 and 1980), to continue the success they purchased.
So now we have National power generation & transmission operations, planned on the hoof.
Each decision based on profit.
Yes, these little bitty, alternative power schemes might have some merit, but their real power generation value and integration, is sucking the death out of the best integrated power generation and transmission the historical side of 1984.
A lot of people are making vast amounts of money from aero-generators; surely they can easily afford to develop the new systems if they are worthwhile.
Meanwhile, in the real world, we are, as noted by P.Baker and others, scrapping a first class power generating system in favour of an expensive and unproven one based on the political power of the believers in AGW
The real question is, not how much power can you get from a vibrating pole, but with crowd funding, how much money you can get from a flock of sheep !
It is a Turbine. Not the Nacelle at the top though. The whole device is a turbine. Wind passes through the blades causing them to rotate which in turn drives a set of gears which in turn generate electricity.
As usual with all these theories, and that is what it is, we have to actually build a model and test it QUANTITATIVELY. There are other ways to analyze these “new” ideas, but nothing can compare to actually having one WORK with a measured output. Anything else is speculation. Have they indeed do any quantitative work on this machine? They do not indicate that they have.